Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang | 1971, Seoul

In her work, Haegue Yang seeks to communicate without language, in a primordial and visual way. She often complements her vocabulary of visual abstraction with sensory experiences that include scent, sound, light and tactility. Combining industrial fabrication and folk craftsmanship, Yang explores the affective power of materials in destabilizing the distinction between the modern and pre-modern. Her practice extends across various media, from paper collage to staged theatre pieces and performative sculptures. The artist’s unique visual language is comprised of Venetian blinds, clothing racks, synthetic straw, bells and graph paper —torn, lacquered, woven, lit, and hung. Her artistic explorations stem from material-based concerns, accompanied by philosophical, political and emotionally charged readings of historical events and figures. Her ongoing research is empowered by underlying references to art history, literature and political history, through which she re-interprets some of her recurrent themes: migration, postcolonial diasporas, enforced exile and social mobility. As a result, these pieces link various geopolitical contexts and histories in an attempt to understand and comment on our own time. This translation – from the political and historical into the formal and abstract – demonstrates an unshakable faith that historical narratives can be made comprehensible without being linguistically explanatory in an objective or didactic way.